


When Is A Monster Not A Monster? Oh, When You Love It

by on_the_moon_at_last



Category: Arrow (TV 2012)
Genre: Angst, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Arrow Spoilers, Closure, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Healing, Hurts So Good, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Moving On, Post 6x12, Post-Canon, RIP Laurel Lance, Short One Shot, Spoilers, and he shows her that montage of Laurel, bravo katie, the beginning of it anyway, there was so much emotion in that scene, this is inspired by that scene between them where he tries to get her to see the light
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-04
Updated: 2018-02-04
Packaged: 2019-03-13 07:44:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,640
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13565991
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/on_the_moon_at_last/pseuds/on_the_moon_at_last
Summary: Dinah finds herself back at Quentin's apartment after killing Vigilante. Surprisingly, she doesn't want him dead. She wants to learn, to understand.Spoilers for 6x12 of Arrow, "All For Nothing".





	When Is A Monster Not A Monster? Oh, When You Love It

**Author's Note:**

> This story was inspired by the scene in Thursday night's episode where Quentin and Thea try to get through to Dinah by showing her who Laurel actually was. It's sort of a sequel to that scene, set the morning after 6x12. Title comes from the quote by Caitlyn Siehl.

** When is a Monster Not a Monster? Oh, When You Love it **

****

**_February 2 nd, 2018 7:00:34 AM Pacific Standard Time._ **

There’s darkness in Dinah. There’s also light. But here’s the thing about light: when one grows so accustomed to the darkness, the light becomes the single most terrifying thing in the world.

++++++++++++++++++++++++

She’s tired. Of all of it. Tired of fighting, tired of killing. Tired of being in the service of powerful men who threaten her life and force her into things she knows in her heart is wrong. After her last encounter with Drake, she had departed with James. Cayden James was another man threatening her life. In any other circumstance, she would kill threats to her life. But James was crafty. So were Zolomon and Chase. Though she had proven herself a formidable adversary to this Earth’s Oliver and his colorful cohorts, the technology here had shown her beyond a shadow of a doubt that she was easily disabled if her opponent knew what to look for. A simple dampener had been enough to neutralize her in the Arrow Cave on Christmas Day 2016, and she’d been shot on that island five months after that. Then James found her, saved her life. Easy to see why she elected to go with him.

Yes, she had departed with James last night. This morning, though, was a different matter entirely. She had gone off on her own. Wandered the streets until dawn. It was about seven in the morning now, little bit later. She hoped to intercept him prior to his departure for work. A fool’s errand, she knew. Why was she doing this anyway? What he had shown her was someone else, wasn’t it? Not her. She had said as much.

Asking for help isn’t something she does. It’s not something she knows _how_ to do.

And yet- here she is.

And yet- she is curious.

And yet- she craves that normalcy.

7:07:51 AM PST.

She knocks on the apartment door.

_Bah-bah-bah. Bah-bah-bah._

She waits, and waits, and waits.

And waits.

It seems to her, impatient impulsive her, that she waits a small lifetime. She finds herself gulping. Dinah Laurel Lance hasn’t gulped in years.

_No gulping, Dinah! Gulping leads to fear, and fear is weakness! Do not be weak, you are not weak!_

Or is that just the metahuman side of her brain talking? Or is it Hunter Zolomon? Probably a mix of both. Mostly the latter. She remembers his “training” all too well. His indoctrination. Not that he needed to do much. She had always heard something about how the dark matter deleteriously effects brain chemistry. Doesn’t matter. He’s dead, right? She shakes it off and knocks once more.

Only a few months ago she would have grown tired of waiting and departed or, if she were feeling particularly vindictive, gone with the Ockham’s Razor solution and sonic-screamed the door off its hinges. She doesn’t do that. Against her better judgment, she knocks one final time.

_Bah-bah_ a slight pause _bah._

7:10:15 AM PST.

She expects absolutely nothing.

He must be gone for the day. Better luck tomorrow or next time. Wait, what is she talking about? There’s not gonna be a tomorrow or a next time. Why the hell did she come here again? As she turns to go, as she pivots fully to face the hallway to walk back the way she came, the door opens and, on reflex, she turns to face the man who opened it. For a moment, her heart stops.

It’s him.

He’s okay.

He’s alive.

_Daddy!_ A part of her wants nothing more than to throw her arms around him and hug him as tightly as possible and pepper his face with kisses. Try as she might, she still cannot shake that feeling. But she doesn’t give in to that old familiar urge. Because she’s not that little girl anymore. Because she can’t.

Because it’s not _him_. It’s **_a_** him, but he is not **_her_** him. Despite what she told him, she still has to remind herself of that unassailable truth. Her father is dead. Has been for almost 20 years. 20 years in April. The man she lost on the morning of her 13th birthday is not the man standing before her now. But the look she gets from him- ohhhh, that look- of combined confusion and unconditional love is so evocative.

It’s sooo close, what she craves. She almost has it in her reach. Ever since she learned of the existence of the multiverse, it is the only thing in life that she has desired. The only reason she kept on going.

“Laurel?” His voice breaks through the crypt-like silence in that hallway. Breaks through her own fantasies and she comes crashing back to reality. She’s known for a while that this isn’t just a return to normalcy that _she_ craves. On the contrary, it’s something that they both crave more than the next vital intake of air into their lungs.

“Lau- sorry. Dinah, right?”

“C-“ she blinks, gulps again, looks down and then up at him. “May-” good Lord, this is so hard for her, “Can I come in? Can we talk?”

“I, um-“

“P-please?” And it is not the ‘please’ of a confident adult either. It’s the ‘please’ of a scared, confused little girl. A small child. A 13-year-old lost and alone in a cruel world. “Please?”

She knows this is probably going to make him late.

To her surprise, he does not seem to care. Good.

He sidesteps and allows her entry into the modest common area of the apartment. She sees the destroyed projector on the floor, the overturned chair. She sits by that ruined projector. Stares at it.

She’d read up on him prior to her impersonation at Chase’s behest. Read up on all of them, memorized every little detail, memorized their damn _social security numbers_. But this is new information. She had only known details of Laurel’s life that directly pertained to the people Chase had wanted her to manipulate. Nothing incredibly personal.

When she first arrived as the general of Zolomon’s metahuman army, she had constantly heard about the death of Dinah Laurel Lance. Her doppelganger, she surmised.

Laurel this, Laurel that. God, they made her sound like some unattainable goddess. Some paragon of incorruptible pure pureness. It nauseated her. She thought her weak, one-dimensional. Hokey. Nothing to aspire to. Being constantly compared to “precious angel Laurel” in captivity in Central City made her detest and resent this dead woman. Then she learned about the alcoholism. Learned that, despite everything, Laurel was still human and flawed. Just like her, but in a different way. Not a deeper or more damaged way, but a different way. And they still thought the world of her? Still compared the two? It just made her hate the beloved dead woman more.

And it scared her. Hell, it **_terrified_** her.

Where Quentin’s demon is the bottle, hers is Laurel.

She realizes that she was been staring at the fragmented pieces for long enough and she looks over she shoulder at the man who is the spitting image of her father. She doesn’t want to, but her heart compels her. Good Lord, she doesn’t want to look at him. Part of her can barely stomach it. Part of her is screaming _Go! Go! Leave! Get out, it’s a trap! He’s seen who you are and he’s only going to reject you like every other judgmental asshole in this holier-than-thou dimension! Go!_ And part of her wants, no, needs- to stay. To stay and talk, if only for a few minutes. What good would that do, though? She’s already consigned herself to her fate in this dimension: life as a hated monster destined to know only rejection, pain, suffering, and loneliness for the rest of her days. All because she isn’t their Laurel. Precious Laurel. All because she’s gone down a dark path. She is so keenly aware of the person she has allowed her circumstances to turn her into. She hates herself for it. She’d never admit that to herself, but she does. And what she does eases that self-loathing.

“I heard you killed Vinnie Sobel last night,” he says. It’s flat, unbiased. No positive or negative judgment.

“Yeah. Yes, I did. Because James asked it of me. I whispered into his ear and Drake watched.”

“He kills people who disobey him, huh?”

“He does. He reminds me of- forget it.”

“You said you wanted to talk,” and then he’s on the couch, patting the cushion right beside him. That’s a tiny bit too intimate for her at this particular juncture, so she elects to sit on the opposite side. A good five feet from him. She nods.

“I don’t know where to start. I don’t understand.”

“I got time.”

“You have work.”

“I have time.”

That’s all she needs, isn’t it? Time enough. A sharp inhale. She hasn’t looked at him since sitting on the couch, instead opting to stare straight ahead. She can still see him out of the corner of her eye, and she catches herself wanting to move him from the periphery to her full line of vision. Connection is weakness. Zolomon said so, hammered it into her skull when he molded her into his perfect soldier. She’s killed for him, and attempted murder in Chase’s name, and killed for James. She’s convinced herself that she enjoys killing people. That she doesn’t do it solely because it is asked of her. Them or her. That’s how it was on her world. She was never given any reason to believe it was any different on this one. So she killed. A lot. And she enjoyed it, right? Right?

“ _You_ wouldn’t understand.”

“I haven’t gotten up and left, have I?”

“No, you haven’t.”

He reaches over, places a hand over hers that’s been clawing into the cushion. Instead of softening, every conceivable muscle in her body tenses. A remarkable feat indeed, seeing as she was already tense. He must feel it, since he withdraws the hand. She doesn’t want him to.

“I don’t understand,” she repeats. It’s barely above a whisper this time. It’s shy. Unlike her. Why is she allowing herself to be like this with him? She remembered when she was talking to Oliver about her past on her Earth, but since then she’s been harsher, tougher. In public, anyway. Vulnerability is weakness, too.

“So I’ve heard. Care to explain that?”

She blinks. Looks from the shattered pieces to the wall. Never at him. She remembers covering her eyes, declaring that this “isn’t me” before sonic-screaming the projector to Kingdom Come and storming out. She wasn’t only speaking about the montage of Laurel that he had created.

“I’m-“ God, no, she can’t say that. Not out loud. She goes for the explanation first. “The people here, they make snap judgments. They judge before they even know a person. I guess that’s the same everywhere. I’ve been here less than two years and everyone I meet hates me. Rejects me because I’m not her. Because I don’t measure up. And it just makes me hate them. Makes me hate her.”

He nods. He understands? She proceeds.

“I wasn’t always like this.”

“We don’t gotta talk about that if you don’t wanna.”

“But I do. My mother’s name was Dinah, too. She was good, kind. She was also a metahuman. ‘The Black Canary’, they called her. She had the same ability that I do, and by all accounts she was a badass. She was the city’s hero long before Robert Queen went all Robin Hood on the place. But to me she was just Mom. She had retired once she got pregnant with me. My father’s name was Larry. Larry Lance. He was a cop, like you. You know what happened to him. You’re the only person I ever told, once I left any place that knew who I was. Once I got here. Zolomon didn’t know. Chase didn’t know. James doesn’t know.” She imagines he feels flattered.

Now she feels even more inadequate for having reminisced about her mom. What would she think of her daughter? Can she continue?

She’s certain she’s built up this idealized version of her father in her mind that she wants the man in front of her to fill. Not good. She’s also pretty sure he wants her to be Laurel 2.0 or something. Also not good. She’s probably projecting her own insecurities and fears onto him. Even worse! How dare she? She has no idea what the hell his actual intentions are. She would never presume to be psychic, but if life in that hellhole they call Earth-2 has taught her anything it’s always assume the worst of people. But with Quentin… there’s something. Different, that’s the word. Different. They both want a fantasy. She recommences. She tells him about Oliver, about the estrangement with her world’s Sara, about the kid she lost. She almost unfeelingly glosses over the kid part, because she **cannot** live that pain again, but she forces herself to goes back and details _every single millisecond she can remember_ as much as she can for the sake of transparency on this strange winter morning in a Seattle town in the cold-ass state of Washington on the West Coast. All of it, everything. No filter. Before she knows it, it’s 8:08:17 AM and she’s spilled her entire life story in this glorious vomit of words mixed in with a barely restrained vortex of multiple emotions all out on the metaphorical floor. It’s scary, allowing herself to be so vulnerable when vulnerability normally would’ve literally spelled out her death warrant. It hurts. It’s so indescribably painful, but also cathartic? She hadn’t intended to. Quentin didn’t say a word, only allowed her to finish. He looks at her with such grace, such grace! How the hell does he do that? How does this broken recovering alcoholic have so much kindness and forgiveness in him? She doesn’t understand it and it frightens the hell out of her. This has got to be some sort of trap, a trick. An illusion. And yet she hasn’t bolted. He hasn’t thrown her out.

And now the moment of truth. The reason why she came. It’s been on her mind since last night, though she’d never admit it. She turns, and the three seconds it takes for her to turn her head are the longest three seconds of her entire 32 years of life. “Can you tell me about her?”

“About Laurel?”

“Yes. I think I’m ready now. Or I can be. In time.”

“I can do time. Whaddya wanna know?”

“Everything.”

“You’ll be here for like a week.”

“I don’t care. Tell me.”

He does. Every little thing he knows of Laurel he tells to Dinah. He even hands her his favorite picture of her, then his favorite of her and Sara, of her and him, of her and all four of them. He hears her mutter under her breath something about her mom still being alive here. His heart shatters for her, just like it did for his baby girl that he kept failing.

It’s 10:37:27 PM now.

She stares at the pictures for a long time, always zeroed in on Laurel. Her face, her eyes. She touches the picture, and touches her own face. So much all at once. Too much. _It’s a lie! A lie! All lies! Don’t trust him! You’re allowing yourself to be manipulated again. He’ll throw you out and curse you the microsecond you don’t measure up to this angel in his photographs. Run! Go! Go-go-gogogo!_

Then she finally does it. Her fear takes over and she does what her brain says it needs to do in order to survive, to make sure it does not shatter and implode in on itself. A microcosm of what she did when she encountered Zolomon and Chase and James for the first time. She submitted in order to live.

She springs up and bolts for the door.

“Dinah!” He stands, as if to stop her from leaving. On instinct, she turns back and almost does what she was so close to doing to Barry Allen almost two years ago. But she doesn’t. She turns back to the door, one hand on the handle with the other bracing her against the door. Her forehead almost touching that cold wood.

“Dinah? Laurel?”

It’s all over now. This is the point of no return. No going back.

Everything ever hits her like a Mack truck all at once.

“Oh, god… Oh my God, what have I done?!”

She cries, sobs, weeps openly for the first time in almost two decades. Dinah Laurel Lance lets the floodgates open and do what they will. She slides down to the floor, fingernails raking at the door and grip tightening on that handle as she connects to the hardwood.

Surprisingly and simultaneously unsurprisingly, Quentin is on the floor with her before she even realizes what’s happened. This outpouring of emotion that is so uncharacteristic of her, even before she got hit with the dark matter. Dinah falls into his lap so easily, with such familiarity, and he accepts. He doesn’t shy away. Maybe this happened a lot with Laurel when she was a kid? She buries her face in his chest and just lets the fuck go. One arm snakes around to his back while the other crawls up. Her hand finds purchase in his hair. She’s probably hurting him. She doesn’t really care in this moment. Neither does he.

Her hand is stroking her long blonde locks and he’s rocking her. “It’s alright, just let it all out.” Well. This is definitely not what she expected when she had that moment with him and that projector in this very room not twelve hours ago. She moves up, and presses the side of her head against his.

“HaaaaaAAAAHHHH!!! Aaaahhh-haa!” Not a sonic scream this time. A very human one, full of rage and pain and the intense agony of 20 years. He’s still rocking her. He’s crying too.

She pulls back and stares into his eyes so much like her father’s. The spitting image, really. She’s dehydrated, her teeth are chattering, and she’s repeating the same phrase over and over. “I can’t, I can’t! Quentin, I can’t!” It’s the first time she’s ever used his name. He holds her face in his hands, and her his.

“I can’t, I can’t, I can’t.”

“I’m not asking you to be.”

“Then what are you asking me?”

“Exactly the same thing that you want of me. That’s all I’ve ever wanted of you ever since we met.”

They know. They need. They crave. They hunger. It’s air to them, more vital than the next breath.

Normalcy. A do-over. A return to an emotional equilibrium so long denied both Dinah Laurel Lance of Earth-2 and Quentin Lance of Earth-1. A chance to right a wrong, not replace someone or to expunge the wrong from their record. She lost her father, a man she hardly knew. He lost her daughter, a woman he knew intimately and repeatedly failed due to his own fear and projecting his own self-loathing at his own shortcomings and weaknesses onto her.

Dinah once thought of Laurel as weak. Simple. Ruled indomitably by her mental illness and slave to her own limitations. Nothing more. At least that’s the picture Zolomon painted for her. In the Darwinian worldview of Earth-2, certainly nothing to write home about. She figured it was Laurel’s mental and emotional shortcomings that led to her brutal murder at the hands of that crazy motherfucker. Who she later learned was a crazy _wizard_ motherfucker. Oh. Shit. Oh, shit. She didn’t know the truth of who Laurel was. How she never let her shortcomings define her. God, she had no idea who Laurel was. The **_HERO_** she was, how good and kind and selfless. Not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but good. Goodness doesn’t have to mean purity. She wasn’t someone who let her limitations or the opinions of others define her. Just because people didn’t kiss the ground she walked on doesn’t mean people hated her. Dinah was never given a chance to make that distinction. Laurel was a hero. Last night catalyzed that realization for Dinah, and this morning cemented the truth of it in her mind.

In hindsight, _she_ was the weak one. Bitter and resentful of Laurel, scared and angry on a foreign world. Doing what she can to survive, no matter the consequences. And what is she after now? Some fantasy? Something inauthentic? No, fuck that toxic, black-and-white mentality. TO HELL WITH IT! Just because he’s not her father and she’s not his daughter doesn’t mean this is not an inauthentic moment between them or that wherever they go from here is inauthentic. No, this is real. This is the realest human connection she’s had in half a decade. And she feels safe here. She doesn’t think she’s ever felt truly safe since Larry died. In that moment, Dinah realizes something new: she doesn’t have to _be_ Laurel. That would only be a massive disservice to both of them. No. She only has to follow her example.

Just as there was a potential for great darkness in Laurel, such is there a potential for great light in Dinah.

But here’s the thing about light: when one grows so accustomed to the darkness, the light becomes the single most terrifying thing in the world. Today was the first step of a very long journey. A path to healing for the both of them. A path back to the light.

And that is certainly better than nothing.

**Author's Note:**

> I hope you guys enjoyed my little foray into the mind of Black Siren! Comments are always appreciated and encouraged! :)


End file.
